Hey welcome to another Flarecorp Media camping thing.
I'm Jason and today I want to talk about what happens when you're out hiking and you've
lost track of what direction your tent is and you've left your trusty compass or your
GPS device back at said tent.
Well everyone knows you can use nature to figure out the rough estimate of direction
you're headed, but not everyone knows how to do that.
So today I thought I'd give you five quick tips on how you can use the sun, moon, stars,
and then wind and storms to get a rough estimate of what direction you're headed.
As well as that, I'm going to give you one quick bonus tip on how you know when you need
to start setting up camp because it takes a little bit of time to get your tent set
up and a fire started and all that and there's a quick easy way to figure out just when you
need to start doing that.
So without further ado, let's get started.
So the first and most obvious tip is using the sunset or sunrise or moonrise or moon
set to figure out what direction you're going.
The sun sets in the west and rises in the east.
However, you need to remember that the sun doesn't set directly in the west unless it's
the time of year for your part of the hemisphere or you're on the equator where the sun is
going directly overhead.
What you need to know about navigating with the sun is that it moves in an arc across
the sky.
During most of the year in my part of North America at 40 degrees north, the sun stays
in the southern half of the sky.
This means the sun rises and sets south of true east and west.
During the summer months, however, the lean of the earth causes the sun to swing in a
bigger arc.
The rising and setting is now north of due east and west but it still arcs up into the
southern hemisphere at noon.
It's only around the spring and autumn equinoxes that the sun reliably crosses directly over
due east and west.
This means you need to be conscious of the time of year and roughly how far away from
the equator you are to allow yourself to compensate for the sun's off center path.
So right here is west and I know that that is slightly of to the side so as you're walking
with the sun in the northern hemisphere and it's not directly overhead you got to remember
if your headed west it needs to kind of be over your left shoulder as you're walking
depending on the time of year.
Same thing if you're heading east it needs to be over your right shoulder and reverse
that if you're in the southern hemisphere.
Those of you lost on the equator are lucky because you’ve got a perfect map.
Now another trick we can use to use the sun to help us navigate is to use shadows from
sticks.
Now I would use this long stick but it's a little hard to see on camera, so I’m going
to use this big tripod.
So if I come and set it here.
And then I'm going to use a rock or another stick and put it at the tip of the shadow.
And then we're going to wait an hour and a half or so and the shadow is going to move.
And that movement will let us navigate.
I’ll show you how in just a second.
All right it's been about an hour and I have to stop it because the sun is almost setting.
The shadow is moving a lot faster.
Now if the Sun were this close to setting I could just use the sunset to help me figure
out this direction but imagine the sun's up higher and you can't quite tell which direction
it’s moving.
This would be a much much better trick.
Anyway, we have our initial mark which is right here.
I'm gonna put a pinecone there so we can see it better.
Then we're going to come all the way out here to where the shadow is now, way out here.
And so, because like I said, the Sun goes east to west, we know that.
I’m going to take a stick in this case, because it's such a far distance, and line
up my two pine cones.
And now I know that this direction is west.
And this is going to work regardless of where the Sun is in the sky.
If it's around the noon hour you might have to wait longer than one hour.
It might take two hours in order to get a shadow distance that's far enough apart.
That's going to give you a really good estimate of which direction is east and west.
So to check this I've got my compass here.
So we'll just get the north lined up with north.
And yes, that is really close to going directly east and west.
Now as soon as I started recording how to use wind and weather to navigate I quickly
realized it's going to be too big of a topic for this video which already has other stuff.
So I'll just give you a couple quick tips.
Save the rest for another video.
One, basically just need to know about your area, so if you're traveling abroad or someplace
new you should take time to learn the weather patterns.
I know my area of the United States, central United States, pretty well, Nebraska, Eastern
Colorado, South Dakota, Iowa, and I generally know how the wind and weather works so I can
use that because I have some prior knowledge.
But the first tip you can use is to use the cirrus clouds.
Now the cirrus clouds are the ones way up high.
They're usually wispy, way up there and wind up there does not change direction nearly
as much as it does down here near the surface.
And so if you see some cirrus clouds or other high clouds, you can also use airplane contrails,
find it based on like a tree branch or something and sit there and watch it for 15 minutes
and see the direction it’s moving and then compare it based off of a known source such
as the shadows that we went over or something like that.
And then you can navigate by those if you lose track of the sun or something, it goes
behind other clouds or something, you can navigate by those upper clouds for hours and
sometimes up to days without them changing direction too much.
The next tip is if you happen to know what the weather is supposed to be like over the
next couple of days.
If it's going to get warmer, I know in this area wind usually comes from the south, southwest.
If it's going to get colder it usually comes from the north and so you can take something
like a Handkerchief or something like that and hold it up and and figure out which direction
it’s going.
Right now it’s blowing really strongly and I know tomorrow and tonight it's going to
get colder than it has been the last couple days so that tells me, I know this area, that
the wind is blowing from the north.
So I've positioned myself here with the wind blowing directly into the lens and hopefully
that's going to be in focus here.
You can see, we're going pretty well north there.
The final tip about using storms is almost always in my area storms come from west to
east, usually from, well it depends.
It can be from the southwest or the northwest.
If it's snow it usually comes from the northwest because it's coming down from a stream from
the Canadian Rockies and so I can kind of watch those storm clouds move and get a feeling
for what direction is what.
But those are some quick general tips you can use to navigate with the wind and weather.
It's a real art form, how to use it using the the prevailing winds and the way the tops
of the trees grow and bend.
I'm not familiar with it enough to be able to explain it well, so we'll save it for another
video.
So here's a bonus tip for you.
How do you know when to start setting up camp?
Well the rule of thumb is to set up with two hours left before the sun sets.
How can you figure that out if you don't know what time the sun sets?
Well, there's a simple handy tip for that.
The sun moves across the sky 15 degrees in one hour and it just so happens that your
outstretched hand, the fingers on it, cover up 15 degrees of the sky.
And so you can actually hold out your arm at arm’s length and that means each finger
of your four fingers is 15 minutes.
And so, if I come out here and put my hand at the horizon or where the sun is going to
set, so behind those trees, so I'm going to raise it above those trees and then stack
it up.
I can see that I have roughly 2 hours and 15 minutes before the sun is going to be behind
those trees.
It doesn't matter what time zone you're in or if it's daylight savings time because it's
just based on degrees not on actual time and I know that, having checked the sun setting
time, that that's pretty accurate within about, for me, oh, today it's about 7 minutes difference.
So this is really hard to do with this camera but you can see if I am about at arm length
here from the camera and put that arm out there, you can see I'm just at two hours until
the sun would go behind the horizon because each finger is 15 minutes.
So it’s time to start setting up camp.
The
next tip I have for you is using the moon to find a southerly direction and it works
in nearly all phases of the moon except for a new moon and a full moon.
So what you basically do is look at the crescent shape of the moon and you look at the two
points and you draw an imaginary line through the points of the moon and that line is going
to point in a southerly direction if you're in the northern hemisphere.
If you're in the southern hemisphere that line is going to point to a northerly direction.
And so you can visualize that.
You can imagine it.
You can hold up a stick and even if it's not a crescent, but you know, slightly curved,
not a full moon or new moon, like I said, you can still use your imagination to figure
out where those points would be.
So now that it’s night and the moon is still out, it's actually a couple days since I last
recorded the first try at this, now it's created a half of a moon and there's a distinct line
so it might be easier to see how it points in a southerly direction.
So I'm going to get behind the camera and hold up my phone compass on that and show
you how it points southerly.
It's almost a half moon right now and it's created a really nice line.
The line actually rotates as the moon travels through the sky from rising to setting, keeping
it pointed in the same direction.
I’ve frozen the moon and now I'm going to focus in on my phone's compass.
I'll line the guide arrow up with the moon behind my phone.
For this, I'll just slide the copy over on top of it and you can see that the line points
southerly.
I say southerly because it's not always due south nor is it easy to get a perfectly exact
reading on the direction.
Now that we have a clear night sky I can show you how to find north using Polaris, the northern
star, and Polaris is almost due north and it's pretty easy to find once you know what
to look for.
There are two constellations you can use to help you pinpoint exactly where the north
star is and once you learn what it looks like you can find it pretty easily.
Unfortunately this only works in the northern hemisphere.
I’m not in the southern hemisphere to show you how to navigate down there, so maybe if
I ever get down to Australia I can do an update on this video.
Anyway, let me jump behind the camera and show you how to find it.
To find Polaris, the north star, the easiest way is to look for the big dipper.
I have it on my screen right here and hopefully you can see it.
It's currently upside down with the handle going off to the right and the bucket, well,
on the left, those four kind of squarish stars.
What you do is you look at the left side, or the outside part of the bucket.
So in this shot, it’s the left side, those left 2 stars, and if you follow those straight
down.
Let me get this lined up here.
So if we follow those straight down you’re going to see right there, almost near the
center of the screen, there in the center is Polaris.
So the easiest way to find that star is to follow the big dipper, those two stars straight
down and that's going to be Polaris.
Another way to find it is, let me see if I can find Cassiopeia here.
So Cassiopeia is this W shaped constellation right here in the center of the screen and
if you follow the, well what's currently in the middle of the screen and the one down
below it that part of the W, and follow that up.
It almost points directly at Polaris as well, which is right there.
It's not perfect but it's pretty dang close as well.
So if we come straight down you can see there's Cassiopeia again.
And so using those two constellations you should always be able to find the North Star.
It's almost due north.
It's like eight tenths of a degree off of true north.
It varies very little throughout the whole night so you can put a five hour time lapse
on it and hardly see any movement.
Polaris is also part of the Little Dipper, but the Little Dipper’s really hard to see
in city lights, but you can see the Little Dipper going off up there.
But here, if I zoom back out and drop the camera… the phone, you can see that.
I can't see it on my LCD screen, the Little Dipper.
Anyway, that's going to do it for this camping tips thing.
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Thanks for watching.